A Raisin in the Sun and The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window by Lorraine Hansberry

A Raisin in the Sun and The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window by Lorraine Hansberry

Collected together, two of the most electrifying classic masterpieces of the American theater, remarkable not only for their historical value but for their continued ability to engage the imagination and the heart. With an Introduction by Robert Nemiroff.
 
"Rich and warm and funny and varied ... beautifully written." --Los Angeles Times, on The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window

"One of a handful of great American plays--it belongs in the inner circle, along with Death of a Salesman, Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Glass Menagerie." --Washington Post, on A Raisin in the Sun
 
By the time of her death, at the tragically young age of thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry had created two milestones of the American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry gave this country its most movingly authentic portrayal of black family life in the inner city. Barely five years later, with The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, Hansberry gave us an unforgettable portrait of a man struggling with his individual fate in an age of racial and social injustice.
 
"Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of Black people's lives been seen on the stage," observed James Baldwin shortly before A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959. The play's title comes from a line in Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem," which warns that a dream deferred might "dry up/like a raisin in the sun."
 
From John Blaine's Foreword to The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window: "It is drama of such clarity that one may return to it again and again, and, I expect, emerge as deeply moved; and each time the more illumined.... Miss Hansberry, I am convinced, doesn't know how to create a character who isn't gloriously diverse, illuminatingly contradictory, heart-breakingly alive.... [A] personal odyssey of discovery, a confrontation with others in the process of which [Brustein] discovers himself."

Lorraine Hansberry won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play of the Year at the age of twenty-nine, making her the youngest American, fifth woman, and first black playwright to do so. Her novel A Raisin in the Sun has been published and produced in more than 30 countries, and her film adaptation was nominated for Best Screenplay by New York critics and won a Cannes Film Festival Award. Lorraine Hansberry died of cancer at the age of thirty-four, during the run of her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. Her renown has only grown in the years since her death. To Be Young, Talented, and Black, a dramatic biography of the writer told in her own words, was the longest-running Off-Broadway drama of 1969, and has been recorded, filmed, and expanded into a book, as well as touring an unprecedented forty states and two hundred universities.

During the 25th anniversary stage staging of A Raisin in the Sun by the Roundabout Theatre in New York City in 1986, the play was universally regarded as one of the greatest American classics. The PBS American Playhouse TV adaptation of the 25th-anniversary version garnered one of the greatest viewing crowds in PBS history when it premiered in 1990. Les Blancs, her final play, which was produced posthumously on Broadway and subsequently in notable regional theaters, has been acclaimed as her best by a number of critics.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780679755319
ISBN 10	0679755314
Title	A Raisin in the Sun and The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window
Author	Lorraine Hansberry
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	1995-06-13
Number of pages	368
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.